Imprint and Trace: Handwriting in the Age of Technology

First published in Germany, Imprint and Trace has been translated but not necessarily into English. Some of it is translated into italics. To begin by letting the author have the last word or words: “archiviolitic pneuma” is the less than comprehensible expression with which the book ends, an example of Sonja Neef’s use of italics when one difficult word is qualified by another. Sometimes italics make easy words, or even bits of easy words, look difficult: we have “the return of writing”, which itself returns as “the return of writing” and then, to stress the essential “coming-backness” “the return of handwriting”. Then there’s “hand writing”, presumably to differentiate it from the sort where the pen is held by the toes or clenched between the buttocks. …